Copernicus Hackathon in Bari: 3 reasons for a success

Held in Bari in October 2019, the Copernicus Hackathon has been a success for at least three reasons, and I'm glad to look into what's behind it. Below comes a list in no particular order.

One fact is the climate of enthusiasm and satisfaction that reigned during the 3 days. Participants, selection board members and mentors shared their positive feelings with me in different ways during and after the event. I will not dwell on this: it is the result of a magical combination of professionalism, politeness and mutual esteem which - not to be taken for granted - arose between my colleagues from Planetek Italia, the people of Impact Hub, the friends of onData and the colleagues of HERE. Spending 3 days closed in the same place, and coming out with a smile at the end, is a gift. I have to thank everyone for this, and I'll never cease to be amazed when these kinds of things happen.

A second element of success, in my opinion, was the composition of the participants. As can be seen from the graph, less than a quarter of the participants came from the geospatial market. This is certainly atypical for a copernicus hackathons .

This result was certainly due to the decision to entrust the event's promotion and marketing activities to Impact Hub. If Planetek had done it, we would probably have fished in the traditional 'Space' world. To favor the user uptake of Copernicus we had to get out of this niche, and Impact Hub did it great, engaging web developers, graphic designers, and experts in business models and innovation.

A few days before the event, while talking with a couple of friends from the Copernicus world, I discovered that they didn't know anything about the hackathon. A big OMG?! came to my mind, but then I realized that we already had 100 registrations; I looked at the diversity of the participants’ skills and I said to myself: we made it.

Finally, the last element of success: we wanted strong and credible applications to come out of the Copernicus Hackathon, which would really create business opportunities and future development for the winners. This is why we have prepared ready to use data and services, heavily exploiting our Rheticus platform, spending time and manpower to pre-cook data and services.

In doing so, we made sure that the participants could devote themselves to designing applications, without worrying too much about how to process satellite data and turn them into meaningful information. In other words, without wasting time in "breaking the pixels", as we like to say in our jargon.

The result was that, out of 6 teams, 6 applications were created and, at least on paper, all of them have the magical combination needed to create a successful business: they are technically feasible, which has been thoroughly verified by our expert mentors in the hall; they are also economically sustainable, or at least grounded in an accurate business model canvas.

I hope you will agree that this is an extraordinary result for a Hackathon.